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Chetna Organic & Fair Trade Cotton Intervention Program

Operational Area: AP, Maharashtra, Orissa

Chetna Organic & Fair Trade Cotton Intervention Program is a flagship program directed towards stabilizing the socio economic status of smallholder farmers and to improve their entrepreneurial capacity. The vision was to transform farmers into entrepreneurs rather than being mere recipients in the cotton supply chain. This was manifested through facilitating farmers to organize themselves into Common Interest Groups (and function more or less on the principles of SHG) and federating into cooperatives / societies / MACS.

Keeping in line with the objective of handing over the ownership to farmers in due course of time, a national level farmer owned association /society with a not-for-profit motive – Chetna Organic Farmers Association (COFA) - was registered at Hyderabad (AP) with representatives from the different cluster level societies/Mutually Aided Cooperative Societies(MACS) in AP & Maharashtra. COFA was formed as a national level body that would facilitate technical and social extension to farmers and involve in advocacy for the organic and fair trade concepts.

Updates

Pragati Ecocentre comes alive with first spell of rain (JULY 2014)

Sept 2013: A team of 6 members, from OIKO Credit, Philippines, along with 14 other Indian staff from OIKO/Manaveeya visited Chetna Organic's cotton fields at Repaka (Karimnagar) for a study on Agri-Business. The focus of the visit was to understand the lifecycle of cotton from the time of sowing seed to selling Lint/Yarn/fabric. Some moments from the visit.